Icon alpha-blending has taken some big steps forward today. First, Antonio Larrosa introduced alpha blending to the HEAD branch in CVS. Here's a screenshot showing one icon blended into another. A few hours later, Carsten Pfeiffer shot back with this tasty screenshot of Konqueror previewing text files with the mimetype icon blended in. Oh, I can't wait for 2.1 -- time to hit CVS! (screenshots below)

Thought I'd put the screenshots right inline for ya'll:

Comments

Completely of topic, but:
Will Qt-3 or KDE-2.1 allow menubars and toolbars to be combined on the same bar to say. Today you can have more than one toolbar vertically connected....Just like IE and Win2000 has it.

Noops.
There is no way to put a menubar together with a toolbar. Ie:
_________________________________________
¦[File][Edit]| ¦[Toolbar Icon] [Icon]
------------------------------------------
That is not supported. There is pretty much dead space between the right most menu (usually help) and the right border of the screen.

This is great. Unlike a lot of people I find many text utilities usefull and I'm not scared about the commandline but I do like a nice looking desktop and I like cool features even though they might not be terribly usefull. I think a lot of people would agree on that. I remember when I first booted up Linux (RedHat 4.2 I think) I though yuck this looks really amaturish. I didn't matter if you could to productive things with the thing. It didn't look proffesional and I think that has scared off a lot of people earlier.

After looking at the Quick Time movies of Mac OS X I'm almost ready to waste a lot of money to get a Mac and play with that wonderful looking OS (yeah I know it's stupid but the OS just looks so good). I hope we will be able to make KDE look like Mac OS X some day. But before we can do that I think we got to get rid of X.

Why is that stupid? I just did exactly that - a 450MHz dual processor G4. I can now run OSX, OS9, and Linux. The machine is fast, it looks superb, and it feels so much better than any PC I've played with. Not a waste of money at all.

I agree with the other poster, it's not stupid. I feel that working with the computer should be a pleasant and productive experience, whether GUI or CLI is your preference, or you always switch between both a lot :-)

That's why my WinBox is skinned to the gills, thanks to the folks at litestep.net and skinz.org. They hardly resemble that boring ol interface from u-know-where

Speaking of icons and alpha channels, I've been having a problem that no one else seems to have seen. Anyone know about this?

Using recent CVS, starting about three weeks ago, kicker icons look fine during the zooming. However, if I turn off the zooming, the icons are all greyed out. Going to the control panel for icon effects shows no effects active. If I apply an effect, it works but the icon is still greyed out.

This is after reinstalling from scratch with fresh CVS and a fresh .~/kde. Any ideas?

bablefish says:
Antonito is a teacher, the grasped Malagueno more than I have seen. In addition I have much to him envies because it lives more near my girl (she is in Seville and I in Barcelona). It would already please me to my power to have your knowledge to be able to contribute to KDE. Now that my editorial has closed my magazine could put to me completely in it, I will have to conform to me to the translation

No, and I don't want to do it. Instead, I guess it will run better on my Athlon 600 redirected to my P200 doing it's good job on true alpha blending, instead of doing icon overlapping on a static background, thing that started with win95.

What a stupid idea! With berlin's architecture all the alpha blending happens in the (display-)server, so your 486 would do it.

The idea is that clients create graphics in the serverprocess. So that knows everything it needs to redraw, change alpha transparency of windows, move the windows around, ... all without _any_ communication with the server. Once a UI is set up only chnages in the client's state are transmitted over the network. That way we use very little bandwidth.

this is one step towards a windows-like gui and when i say windows-like im mean a gui stuffed with crap nobody needs. stuff like this here is only slowing down the system - increasing kde-code - could make system unstable

Daniel you are so right! KDE still misses a lot of nice features. I don't want to say that this alpha blending isn't nice to look at, but it doesn't make the desktop more usable.
First of all make the desktop more stable! There are so many bugs left on the new KDE2. I think that KDE has no change as a multimedia operating system, but has a lot of users in the scientific world. These users don't need alpha blending, but need a fast and stable desktop.
I would like to see features like burning a CD without starting an external program (modul in konqueror? - just drag and drop on a CD-symbol?), better tools for programming (keep developing on kdevelop!), to combine kmail,korganizer,kab and some others to something like 'outlook'.

But, the thing that you have to remember is;
Different people do different things, some work on the stability some work on the candy, so should the people on candy wait for the others, or should the do more work? Seriously, that's what makes KDE so cool, lots, and LOTS of cool crap that can be turned on... It's not like they'll force you to use this... And I for one want a mouse with a shadow... ;-p

I think you could probably attract more new people to KDE by including all these fairly pointless but pretty features like alpha blending, shadow mouse pointers, anti-aliased text and so on, as these people would probably come from a Windows environment which is full of rubbish that no-one needs.

In regards to code bloat from these new features, please bear in mind it's KDE we're talking about which is fairly modern in terms of the technologies it uses (apart from X :-)) unlike Windows 95/98/SE/Me/2K/Whistler which is based on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.

As long as people who don't want them have the option to turn them off, I don't really mind, so long as it doesn't divert resources from putting in all those really cool features...

Gfx cards get faster and faster.
Memory (let's hope!) tends to fall in price ,ost of the time.
CPU power grows rapidly.

Windows has some nice features. Only a fanatic can say it's completly crap.
(I use AmigaOS btw. (you could name me a fanatic, hehe), neither Windows
nor Linux, but soon will)

And guess what: My mouse-pointer HAS a shadow and it looks absolutly cool.
I don't know how it is on Linux, but I guess the mouse-pointer is a bitmap.
Here it is. And it has a shadow drawn in.

What definitly would be cool would be an option to position the lightsource
on your desktop: The shine/shadow elements of the GUI would be rendered
according to that. And connect that with the daytime and you have a sun
moving on your desktop. That would be cool. Hehe.

Don't get me wrong !
I like thin and stable systems. I LOVE the commandline, I really like passing series of commands through a pipe, I often prefer it rather than firing up a full blown GUI.
I am not a GUInatic. I like both worlds at their maximum for maximum joy.
And....I am sure that you can switch this off. (Well, not the bugs, though.)

maybe this is the right moment to discuss something, i lately noticed.
i switched to icewm as my desktop of choice.
this is not a big deal.
i still like to use konqueror, kmail, knode, etc.
these are great programs.
but i noticed, that if i start any kde app, several kdeinit processes are started.
i guess these are all the processes to provide enough of a kde environment, that those apps are able to run.
i don't like this really much, but i can understand that it is necessary now.
nevertheless, they should atleast quit, when they are not needed anymore.
i hope that you will think more of other desktop environments soon.
the power of choice is the power of unix.
if you want to become a unix standard desktop, you shouldn't ignore the rules.
this is not a rule, just a friendly reminder ;)
i used to like kde a lot and it sure has a great potential when working together with other applications and not ignoring them.

this feature looks really very nice. But as you have read above, it's not really usefull.
Btw. the shadow cursor like the one from m$win looks nice too.

But I think the real missing features (for developers) aren't implemented yet.

So, what do you think about an integration of CVS access for the konqueror, such as TortoiseCVS for InternetExplorer it is. These is something required from all developers (developing for kde, gnome or all sourceforge projects) (otherwise an standalone K-CVS-app)

Text preview: Theoretically a very useful feature, but the way its done above is not good enough. First, as mentioned several times above, the icon is more important than the content and should thus be displayed stronger. Maybe in the top left corner going over the edge of the white paper, leaving a nice alpha-blended drop shadow on paper as well as background (with different displacements to show that the paper is closer to the icon...)?

Alpha channel for icons: Cool, alpha channel should really be standard when dealing with any kind of graphics.

What would be even cooler is antialiased text. This might be a problem due to stone age X architecture - but if it could be done it would be soo great. It's getting sort of embarrasing not having antialiasing yet... Looks Win3.1-isch to MS users. .

I too would like anti-aliasing. I've seen it working on an OS called Acorn RISC OS ages ago. It need to be done at the X protocol level - but don't despair, I think it's on the way: I've just found this link: